Brazil

CINEMA NOVO

In the 1960s, Latin America was a contested field of struggle. From the
Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the death of Che Guevara in 1967, from the
massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968 to the Cordobazo uprising in 1969, from the
landing of US Marines in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to the series of
military coups that prepared the terrain for neoliberal policies in the
Southern Cone countries, Latin American societies were shaken by social
conflict, political revolt, and military intervention. The failure of
developmental modernization showed the true face of neocolonialism, as
unveiled by the formidable critique of the theories of dependency,
internal colonialism, and cultural imperialism, which proved the coming of
age of Latin American social thought, revealed in an astounding cultural
movement, from theater to literature, from popular music to cinema, from
the social sciences to philosophy and religion. Filmmakers were actively
involved in this movement in order to invent alternative modes of
distribution and exhibition, create different cinematographic languages,
and intervene artistically in the modernizing, revolutionary,
anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist politics of the times.

Cinema Novo (New Cinema) developed in Brazil in the early 1960s through
the heterogeneous production of young filmmakers such as Nelson Pereira
dos Santos (b. 1928), Glauber Rocha (1931–1981), Ruy Guerra (b.
1931), Carlos Diegues (b. 1940), and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
(1932–1988). "Cinema Novo is only part of a larger process
transforming Brazilian society and reaching, at long last, the
cinema," wrote Diegues in 1962 ("Cinema Novo," in
Johnson and Stam, p. 65). Theirs was a political intervention against
neocolonialism, bred by the revolutionary wave that shook Latin America
under the spell of the Cuban Revolution (1959), the expectations generated
by the developmental policies of President Juscelino Kubitschek
(1955–1961) and the radical populism of Jânio Quadros and
João Goulart (1961–1964), who, in alliance with the left
intelligentsia, projected ambitious social reforms. (Under the pressure of
traditional landowners and transnational corporations, Goulart was finally
deposed by the military. The coup inaugurated the era of
"authoritarian" regimes responsible for introducing the
neoliberal adjustments that would convert the region's national
economies to the demands of global capitalism.) But theirs was also a
countercultural strategy in search of an alternative aesthetic to the mass
consumption of genre films churned out in Hollywood, and an alternative
mode of production to the industrialized studio system, whose high costs
of production and dependence on large markets made it utterly inadequate
for Brazil, as the failure of the Vera Cruz studios had dramatically
demonstrated.

Film journals and
cine
clubs fostered a critique of Brazilian cinema and a debate about whether
to build a strong film industry with state support or to pursue a low-cost
production system that would encourage experimentation. The new strategy,
based on location filming, intensive camera work, and nonprofessional
actors, was part of Italian neorealism, whose bare aesthetic captured so
vividly the complexity of social reality, and French Nouvelle Vague, whose
avant-garde aesthetic and philosophical musings offered a seductive
critique of Western modernity. Adapted to the Brazilian milieu through the
lens of Third World anti-imperialism, European avant-garde ideas became a
means for political antagonism. Differing from both Hollywood films, which
were conceived as entertainment and instilled passivity in the consumer,
and European auteur cinema, which was conceived as art and portrayed
existential angst and social alienation, Brazilian cinema produced a
social and political critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. It was,
as Diegues alleged, a committed and critical cinema: "Brazilian
filmmakers have taken their cameras and gone out into the streets, the
country, and the beaches in search of the Brazilian people, the peasant,
the worker, the fisherman, the slum dweller" ("Cinema
Novo," in Johnson and Stam, p. 66). While Hollywood aestheticized
politics and the Nouvelle Vague politicized aesthetics, Cinema Novo,
alongside Cuban Imperfect Cinema and Argentinean Third Cinema, tried to
forge a dialectics of avant-garde aesthetic and revolutionary politics.

Contrary to the soothing continuity of classical films, Cinema Novo
assailed the spectator and her or his most unquestioned values, through
the extensive employment of Brechtian and Eisenstenian techniques of
distancing (such as discontinuous and vertical editing), jump-cuts and
image saturation, and theatrical acting and social symbolism. The
spectator was not allowed to remain passive or relaxed but instead was
disturbed and interpellated by "films of discomfort" made
out of "crude images and muffled dialogue, unwanted noise on the
soundtrack, editing accidents, and unclear credits and titles"
(Rocha, "The Tricontinental Filmmaker," in Johnson and Stam,
p. 77). "Guerrilla" Cinema Novo demanded a noncontemplative,
aesthetically active, and politically committed viewer.

Of course, this is the core of Cinema Novo's fundamental paradox:
it attempted to become a popular art form and a tool for political
liberation through a nonpopulist and nonpaternalistic strategy. However,
despite the filmmakers' awareness that the basis for a
revolutionary cinema is its capacity to build a sustainable public, their
films were only popular among intellectuals, connoisseurs, and film
critics worldwide. They rarely succeeded in attracting "the
masses." Moreover, they naively overestimated their ability to
penetrate foreign markets beyond the festival circuit, and, because of
their lack of resources, they paradoxically came to depend on distributors
and exhibitors for postproduction financing, that is, on those agents who
ultimately controlled the market (Johnson and Stam,
Brazilian Cinema
, p. 380). Theirs was, in a nutshell, a strategy of political awareness
(Paulo Freire's "
concientizaçao
") and aesthetic modernization in which politics and aesthetics
became one through radicalizing Western avant-gardism, while rejecting its
direction.

CARLOS DIEGUES
b. Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, 19 May 1940

Carlos "Cacá" Diegues is a leading figure of
Brazilian cinema. One of the first filmmakers to define Cinema Novo in
1962 as part of a larger cultural movement transforming Brazilian
society, he was also one of the first to declare its dilution into
Brazilian cinema. A staunch supporter of auteur cinema, Diegues believed
that Cinema Novo's social commitment and political criticism
would be possible only through unqualified artistic freedom, cinematic
heterodoxy, and cultural pluralism. This conception of Cinema Novo as a
collective of individual artists more than as an aesthetic school led
him to explore very different cinematic styles, from his neorealist,
pseudo-ethnographical, and didactic films of the 1960s, unmistakably
related to the first phase of Cinema Novo and its aesthetic of hunger,
to his embrace in the 1970s of Tropicalism's spectacular
aesthetics and his denunciation of the submission of art to party
politics, or what was called the "ideological patrols."

His first professional films,
Escola de samba, alegria de viver
(
Samba School, Joy of Living
, 1962, a segment of
Cinco vezes favela
, or
The Slums Five Times
) and
Ganga Zumba
(1963), frame Diegues's thematic and aesthetic concerns: the
recovery of the historical roots and the contemporary expressions of
Afro-Brazilian culture, and its influence on popular music (samba),
religion (candomblé), and carnival. In
Quilombo
(1984), he returned to these themes, this time in the form of a
spectacular super-production that further stressed the mythical elements
of the story.
Xica da Silva
(1976), a carnivalesque rendition of historical events in colonial
Brazil, tells the story of a female slave who shapes politics and the
economy through sex, fantasy, and eroticism. The film, which sparked a
fertile national debate on the issue of "the popular,"
became a box-office hit. Its music, dances, eroticism, and
carnivalization of traditions and reversal of history all fit into the
commercial formula of Tropicalism.

Diegues's lengthy filmography also includes
Agrande cidade
(
The Big City
, 1966),
Os herdeiros
(
The Heirs
, 1968), and
Joanna Francesa
(
Joanna the Frenchwoman
, 1973).
Bye Bye Brasil
(1980), his first film to be a commercial success abroad, is perhaps
Diegues's most complex film, both thematically and theoretically.
It tells the story of Salomé, Lorde Cigano, and Andorinha, three
traveling artists who tour the Northeastern countryside with the
Caravana Rolidei ("Circus Holiday"). Their shows attract
an audience of peasants and Indians in isolated and impoverished towns
where television has not yet arrived. Accompanied by an accordionist and
his wife, the three artists try to find places still uncontaminated by
modern technology and global culture. They head to the Amazonia, where
they discover the most dramatic contradictions brought by globalization.
Years later, they will meet again in Brasília to illustrate
metaphorically two divergent paths toward modernization. The film shows
a country caught between uneven and incomplete modernization and
cornered by economic globalization. It is perhaps one of the funniest
and saddest reflections on the cultural impact of globalization on Latin
American culture, including its films.